Posted
by
Soulskillon Wednesday July 31, 2013 @04:05PM
from the take-a-moment-to-appreciate-free-speech dept.

cold fjord writes "Some reformers travel a harder road than others. The Seattle Times reports, 'The founder of a liberal-minded website in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes after angering Islamic authorities in the ultraconservative kingdom. ... Raif Badawi, through his website known as Free Saudi Liberals, had urged Saudis to share opinions about the role of religion in the country, which follows a strict form of Islam that includes harsh punishments for challenging customs. A judge in the Red Sea port of Jiddah imposed the sentences but dropped charges of apostasy, which could have brought a death sentence, the Al-Watan newspaper reported. Badawi has been held since June 2012.' More at details are available at the BBC, which informs us that 'The judge ordered that the 600 lashes be administered 150 at a time.' 'The lashes could be spread out but in Sharia this is a sign that the judge wants to insult him,' Badawi's lawyer said."

I doubt you can really put a number on it. I know there used to be superstition on exactly this topic and people used to only get some odd number for that reason; however, I think its likely that either someone once died while being whipped; starting the rumor, or someone started it just to have an excuse not to go overboard.

In reality I think it would come down to both the health of the person and the technique of the lasher. I have certainly given 150 or more lashings and seen others give even more/harder lashings but, I doubt anything we do in our bedrooms comes close to what these guys do.

Would also depend on the whip. A bull whip, for example, is much worst than most modern bsdm "cat o 9 tails" types that tend to be made from 10s of foot long strips of soft leather. In fact, I have heard people rant about idiots with no experience who buy bull whips as sex toys without realizing how much damage they can do.

of course, the funny thing is, I occasionally think twice about posting about smoking pot on here, even though I am not actually admitting to a crime in my state. Yet I don't think twice about admitting to having whipped someone for sexual purposes....when my state makes no exception for consensual bdsm in its domestic abuse laws, and doesn't require the "abused" to even agree that they were abused or want to press charges.

Your comment got me curious, so I went and looked it up. From a 2006 report [state.gov] on human rights practices published by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor:

"According to press reports, lashings were generally administered with a thin reed by a man who must hold a book under his arm to prevent him from lifting the arm too high. The strokes, delivered through a thin shirt, are not supposed to leave permanent damage but are designed to leave painful welts that bleed and bruise."

A paragraph or so above that quote is a reference from Human Rights Watch that says that the lashed do not receive medical treatment.

Fascinating. Ouch, that could still hurt....a lot. However, its not nearly what I, or I think most people, imagine at the idea of "lashings".

That said, I don't think the description really does justice to how much pain that really could still cause. A thin reed being so small can generate an awful lot of pain without doing much damage.

I guess in the grand scheme of these whether this is better or worst than being sentenced to time in jail is a matter of personal opinion (I might actually take the beating over the time if it was more than a week or two).... totally aside from how just disgusted I am at the reasons for it.

However, lets keep this in perspective... just a few years ago they wanted to stone a woman to death for "being seen in public with a man who was not her husband".... in an incident where the "witnesses" dragged her from a car and gang raped her.... but were not themselves charged with anything. Her life was only spared after international pressure.

Saudi lashes are not Western lashes.In Western countries, when we we performed lashes it was full force and if just several dozen were performed you are talking potential death, broken bones, and striping flesh off of ribs.

Saudi lashes lashes are more of a sever spanking, causing bleeding and bruising. In particular the wipper is forced to hold a Koran in their swinging arm.

I think he's using the past tense as in the DISTANT past, like 250 years ago on western sailing warships and the like, or back in the days of slavery.

"Distant past" would be 140 years ago in 1881 for flogging with a cat of nine tails and 77 years ago in 1936 for caning in the British navy. Even then it was just suspended and not actually taken off the books until the 1960's.

death by lashes depends largely on how they're administered - so if it's practically something that is death or just slap on the wrist is negotiable by whoever is in power.

saudi arabia sucks big time and they can all go suck cocks. fucking burma is more fair.

if you're going to be a saudi arabian net-activist - first thing you should do would be to move the fuck away from there, because they're giant cocksuckers the whole lot.

now - they know that their business is all purely dependent on oil which is why they're dumping money on some IT business among other tech jobs, which is why there's lots of gigs to there. don't fucking go there to work - and double don't fucking go there to work if you're a woman, just stay the fuck away unless you're invited by royalty and paid royally.

I don't have this harsh opinions about many countries, but saudi arabia consistently manages to be a fuckhole of DIFFERENT RULES FOR DIFFERENT PEOPLE only rivaled by north korea. russia doesn't get half close, china doesn't get close, even the mentioned burma doesn't get half close. even in china getting away with murder of hired underclass is hard and involves both bribing and maintaining secrecy and then escaping the mob retaliation - even if you're part of the party. in saudi arabia no such problems.

you know how in the gulf oil arab countries booze is banned? well fuck, in practice it's available but you'll have to pay through the nose for it since the local booze mafia is run by the princes(ruling class). insulting that class? well fuck, only if you're part of it can you do it. and the worst thing? the fucker saudis aren't even embarrassed about it and act all surprised if they get caught acting like they do when they're visiting other countries as if their slavery contracts extended elsewhere from their shithole in the desert.

btw religion has nothing to do with the state of affairs there, it's just a tool.

You wouldn't die from the lashes themselves no matter how many you receive (mostly just superficial damage to your skin which technically you don't actually need to live, at least not in a sterile environment).

Ummm, you do actually need your skin to live, although you can do without some of it. Aside from infection, traumatized and/or necrotic tissue can also poison the rest of your body.

Given that we are dealing with a society and judicial system that is fine with beheading people with a sword

If I was given the death penalty, I'd far prefer beheading to most of the other options. The electric chair is just odd and wrong, when they use lethal injection they give a massive dose of muscle relaxant (what for?), hanging goes awry sometimes. The last beheading in France was in 1977...

Personally, I think executions should be done by oxygen deprivation. It's painless and effective.

You've been taught a myth in your high school science classes. They tell you that millions of years ago algae and small plants died, and decomposed into oils and coals. This is an evolutionist myth, because the world is only 6001 years old.

Oil actually comes from unnecessary human suffering, but because evil liberal evolutionists conspired to end slavery in the U.S., we had to outsource our oil production to the middle east.

I find it odd that that site is blocked. There is no "objectionable" material on it; ie nakedness, weapons, hatemongering, etc. Just a clipart style poster with icons you can hover over, and a link to buy the poster.

As a Christian who is offended by the US Evangelical misuse of the term "Creationism" to mean something entirely silly, and tired of having to explain how it's only a small minority of Christians, with whom I do take an active role in attempting to re-educate every chance I get, and not Christianity in general that believes the earth is less than 10k years old...

Yeah islam actually uses both the old and new testamant (Islam is in a strange way an offshoot of christianity, in that it has jesus as the messiah, etc).

Well you know all those weird little laws people love to gasp about with islam? They are in the bible too, right down to pork bans, silly hats, long fasts and everything.

And for the most part the sillier ones traditionally got about as much attention as we gave them in christianity. Except for the fact a bunch of fundie jerks got control over some countries and started enforcing the silly laws. But you know the worst part? Most of those fundie jerks are only in power thanks to meddling by western oil powers. Iranians being the exception (Shia has its own type of whackiness)

The Republican party doesn't want to coddle minorities because it believes that minorities are just as capable as the majority, and believes that introducing dependence perpetuates problems. The Democrats want to keep dependency going because they get to harvest votes (instead of the cotton they used to get). Yes, this is surprising news to you that the *Republicans* believe in true equality regardless of race - but that is the history if you care to look.

The sad thing is that I think you've actually convinced yourself of that. That the political parties are now as they have always been, and that the Republicans are still the "Party of Lincoln."

No, if you really look at the history, you see people like Strom Thurmond [wikipedia.org] and his fellow Dixiecrats who left the Democratic Party to become Republicans in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. You see Nixon and the Southern strategy. [wikipedia.org] As Kevin Phillips, Nixon's political strategist said at the time:

"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."

The mid 20th century was a transition time in which the Democrats split over the issue of segregation v. equality. Thurmond's Dixiecrats feuded with the rising liberalism in the party, and the end result was that most Southern Democrats were replaced with equally racist Southern Republicans -- at least the ones that didn't just switch parties themselves. It would be the Republican party that would squeeze out its pro-equality members over the next few decades, not the Democrats. As LBJ is said to have told an aide upon signing the Civil Rights Act, ""We have lost the South for a generation." It was the Democrats who made the political sacrifice to do what's right on race. And it was the Republicans who made the cold, amoral decision to pander to racists to gain their votes.

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me â" because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"

No, his entire post is based on our history within our lifetimes and all of his claims are easily verified.

Your post, however, was nothing but links to right-wing spew sites that are currently occupied with the business of rewriting their own movement's history because that history is repellent to a growing number of voters. That's not a trend that's going to change as the only people left still swallowing the shit you're shoveling are dying off and not being replaced.

Thank you for the links. My morning meeting is nearing its end, so I'll have to keep this shorter than this (especially the third link might merit). In order:

1) Yes, the shift did in fact start earlier than the 1960s. The Republican could not have capitalized on purely racial issues. Just as they could not purely rest on social issues like abortion in the 1980s or terrorism in the 2000s. The economic factor is important, but perhaps overstated when compared to the equal prosperity of white Northerners

I do notice you don't actually address my points directly. You can't argue that the Republicans were form as slavery abolitionists, so you misdirect. You can't argue that the KKK were created by Democrat populace, so you misdirect.

I addressed your core point directly: the idea that Republicans are all true egalitarians and that Democrats have unfairly tarnished them as racists when they were the racists is shown to be utter bunk when you review the last 50 years of politics. I have directly quoted Republican party election strategists on the issue of how they used racial identity politics to try to capture the (at the time) larger white vote by sacrificing the minority vote, and you claim I haven't addressed the point. How exactly

But in the mean time it would sure be nice if the US were a net exporter of oil, the way we are with other fossil fuels. If the goal is stopping support of morally abhorrent behavior in the Middle East, I suggest we take the quick and practical path there. Then we can chase your dream.

Eventually, yes. It's screwing up the climate, the extraction process is environmentally damaging, and even if it can be produced domestically it'll still run out given enough time.

But it's also a dense, reliable and very cheap energy source. The only alternatives are either far more expensive or less practical. So it would take many decades to transition away from oil even if the political will existed. Which it doesn't.

I thought the USA gets most of their foreign oil from Mexico and Canada. Middle East is an afterthought from what I remember. I think the US aspires to be like the Saudis. They are are getting there year by year.

Yes, but oil is a global market. If the Saudis stopped selling, the rest of the world such as Europe, India, and China would have to buy from other sources, sources that we are currently buying from, and it'd drive the price of oil through the roof.

The USA does have too much religion in our politics, but that seems to be killing the republican party so hopefully it will end soon. One day they will learn Goldwater was a fortune teller, not someone to forget about.

Killing the republican party? I don't think so. If they were dying they would not be having so much success in the state governments. And beyond that they have infected the democratic party. Look haw far to the right we have moved. Where you once saw republicans we now see democrats on the political spectrum. The hard right and the middle are well covered in politics what we lack now is a voice from the actual left. So no the republican party is not dying, but the democratic party is.

The place to look at was Turkey - it was a shithole until Attaturk drove the religion out of politics, so much of a shithole that we get the word genocide from the place. Now religion is creeping back into it's politics again with visible negative results.

You'll notice this in all countries where religion is close to state function.

Like the USA which has "In God we trust" on their currency.

That is a slogan with no legal weight. We also have the slogan "A New Order of the Ages", pyramids with all seeing eyes, symbols from ancient Rome (some of which were part of Roman religion), Roman/Greek goddesses, etc.

Where legal weight is concerned all we have is a constitution that says the government can not favor or discriminate against a particular religion.

No, right wing Christians are generally much bigger fans of Saudi Arabia's only truly democratic and generally freedom-espousing neighbor, Israel. To get on Israel's bad side in terms of speech, you pretty much have to give a threat of genocide. Which of course actually does happen frequently due to the loveliness of Islamic Sharia and its campaigns against the Western world. Which brings us back to Saudi Arabia.

Saddam... Saddam... Wasn't he the one who Don Rumsfeld was chummy with in the 80s and who the Reagan Administration was giving tanks, missiles and technology so he could produce chemical weapons? Oh and who also gave him satellite imagery so he could bomb civilian targets in Iran?

So pretty much the same stuff that Allied soldiers from the US did in Europe and Japan during World War 2 ?And again in Nicaragua and Vietnam and Korea and Brazil and... oh before 9/11 you had deposed 53 different democratically elected governments and replaced them with puppet dictators in various parts of the world and there has yet to be a single war where American soldiers did not make themselves guilty of crimes like rape. Nothing special about you on the latter part- you put a boatload of young boys

Does the religion not dictate the politics and the legal aspects of their society?

Partially yes, but eventually they will have to come to terms with the fact that 1400? year old religious-based legal system just cannot be applied in a modern world. Many Muslims have already realized this and accepted it, while others are fighting it tooth and nail. But when it does happen, the legal framework within the religion will be forgotten/ignored much like in Judaism, and then it will really be no more violent/dangerous than modern day Christianity and Judaism are. Because when you think about it, where Islam is right now, Christianity was at the same age. Imagine 14th century Christianity existing right now. It would look pretty bad too.

"Many" as in millions perhaps, but that's a small percentage of Muslims.

When we're talking about the general Muslim population, the people you may know in the US don't count for anything. It's the large populations in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Tunisia, Indonesia, etc. that count. There is widespread support for sharia law throughout the Muslim world.

Because when you think about it, where Islam is right now, Christianity was at the same age. Imagine 14th century Christianity existing right now. It would look pretty bad too.

That argument makes no sense at all. The age of the religion doesn't matter, it's the state of the world that matters. 14th century Christianity was backwards because in the 14th century we didn't have modern science and medicine, electricity, widespread literacy, the Internet, access to the entire world's products and cultures, and instant access to historical information.

Guess what? Muslims have all those things. The literacy rate in Iran is over 98%. Pakistan has over 118 million cell phones.

To top it off there are newer religions that are better, like Sikhism (a monotheistic warrior religion founded in the 15th century as a reaction to the military strength of Islam... that's why they carry swords all the time). Do you think Sikhism is umm 800 years or so behind EVEN ISLAM in terms of modernity? Nope!

Really, if you have a good reason why younger monotheistic religions should be more backwards, despite examples to the contrary, please share it.

Islam is a huge religion with many different sects and orientations. Saying the whole thing is about violence is just ignorance. May as well lump Quakers and IRA bombers together while claiming Christianity is about war.

This whole thing about all of Islam being inherently violent is being brought up again and again by people trying to show about how Christianity is superior, and this meme is originating with churches. Pick out a few verses in the Koran and you've got proof that it's inherently violent, b

TFA seemed a little thin on details, but I believe he is being lashed for having said words to the effect of "people are free to believe or not believe" -- at which point what is being punished is the statement that you are in fact free to disbelieve.

And I'm suddenly finding myself thinking "gee, by the time I was 13 and had given up on the belief in god as something I inherited from my parents but couldn't get behind, does being publicly lashed or sentenced to death seem like a reasonable thing". And I'm forced to conclude that, no, it isn't.

If you read Nonie Darwish's book ( she is the daughter of a well respected high ranking Gaza intelligence officer who was eventually assassinated by the Israelis ) she says the Saudi stuff IS the dominant force in islam today globally and it continues to get stronger, even in America, when she walks into a mosque, what is being privately taught between Muslims is holy war against infidels. She says all the usual excuses about "jihad means inner struggle" is just PR meant for westerners.

Remember this when you get an urge to say that America and Western society is oppressive, and when you decide that Islam is a peaceful religion.

I think you are confusing a political system with a religion.

Saudi Arabia is a country that leverages their religion to implement a very conservative and authoritarian society.

Islam is a religion.

Remember, Christianity has been used throughout history as an excuse to kill, maim, rape, and torture millions of people too. Pretending that Islam is unique in the barbarism that is executed in its name is fuzzy logic at best.

One of the points that The Passion of the Christ gets wrong is the number of lashes given to Jesus. There were strict rules in those days that limited people to "40 lashes minus 1". Of course, they probably don't have glass and broken pottery in their whip, but you could do some serious damage to someone's internal organs with 150 lashes at once.

As much as I love bitching about the issues that we have here in America, seeing what happens in shitholes like Saudi Arabia makes me feel really lucky to have been born here.

... Our government ruin millions of people's lives over possession of a plant - one conviction and you not only lose your freedom for several years, you lose all opportunity for college scholarships and grants, and have to spend the rest of your life in poverty, working shit, low-wage jobs thanks to a felony conviction. For having a fucking plant on you.

But yea, no physical punishment; at least, not legally sanctioned (although I think Brad Manning might have a thing or two to say about that), and you can s

Here's one for you: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy [yourlogicalfallacyis.com] . Stop it with your stupid fallacy link garbage, that's the last resort of morons. Also, yes, it is perfectly okay to look down on societies that are shittier than your own, even if your's isn't that great. Even a slum rat in Detroit can look at Liberia and say "God damn, that place is a shit hole."

You have no right to a feeling of physical safety. Even if you did, it would not trump other rights.

Stupidest thing I've read in years. The right to not be killed unjustly is the right from which all other rights flow. I'm not even going t

The Flaming Liberal, clearly he got what he deserves... 600 lashes and 7 years in prison will definitely change his mind and reform him about those wrong-headed ideas that the blessed Shariah Law-abiding Conservatives of Saudi Arabia are not too punative or quick to deal out harsh rulings.

Yet another prime example of why alien civilizations won't contact us openly: How can a truly civilized race possibly take us as anything other than animals when we still do things like this? Our so-called "civilization" is just as thin a patina over the animal underneath as our neo-cortex is over the rest of our brains. It's positively heartbreaking to read of things like this in this day and age when I know that the human race, at it's best, is in such stark contrast with such senseless ignorance and brutality.

No, I'm not joking, and I'm not trolling either; this is really how I feel about this, and I don't care if anyone likes it or not.Bracing for being flamed all the way down to "-1, Troll" for daring to speak my mind, which ironically enough will prove my point for me better than I can prove it myself.

Well, that and the fact that you couldn't get here from pretty much anywhere in any reasonable amount of time. Personally, I tend to think that's a bigger reason than any particular human behavior, but hey, whatever works for you.

I'm not so arrogant to believe that we've discovered everything physics has to offer, so I'll still hold out for the possibility of methods of travelling interstellar distances in relatively short periods of time.

Lifespan of a fruit fly: about 7 to 14 days.Time to travel across the US by highway, east to west: 7 to 14 days (depending on traffic and route taken)

What truckers do routinely as a vocation takes an entire lifetime for a fly.

Again, that's just here on earth.

If said aliens have 1000 year lifespans, then they could spend 300 years training for the mission, 300 years to get here from the nearest star, and 300 years to return there, and still have around 100 years to tell the rest of their civilization all about it. (We are assuming some non-trivial fraction of C during travel.)

Well, that and the fact that you couldn't get here from pretty much anywhere in any reasonable amount of time. Personally, I tend to think that's a bigger reason than any particular human behavior, but hey, whatever works for you.

Human behavior is why aliens put our planet way out in the middle of no where...

Sure. There are zero good cultures in the ME, so pitting one variety of Muslim against the other is the most efficient way to (help) maintain the divisions and schismatic violence which they love so well and practiced long before tasty oil made it necessary to deal with them.

We must have energy, cheap energy, and since much of that energy comes from our cultural enemies the situation requires careful, amoral manipulation.

When dealing with beasts, choose the most useful. The Wahabis are brutal and nasty, but

These assholes aren't building nukes. The combination of "capable of building WMDs" and "not terrified of the consequences of selling an WMD to a terrorist" is something we prefer to deter, as the death toll is far less that way than if it ends up with retribution instead.

The Iranians are building nukes since they saw what not having them meant for Saddam. If you want to go down that road there is another country in that region that has nukes no one is allowed to inspect, often unilaterally attacks its neighbors and is running a brutal occupation in ways that violates international agreements including using tactics like collective punishment. For some reason we are best buds with them too.

You have death penalty in the US. And CIA-sanctioned extrajudicial torture. And lots of children-killing drones that rain death all over Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan, among others. And if you're convicted in your late teens for, say, smoking pot, your life is pretty much ruined forever, thanks to the eternal stain that won't let you get an education or a decent job, therefore making sure you remain in poverty ad aeternum.

Is that somehow less barbaric than what Saudi Arabia does? Please explain how.

Seems to me, if any of the "explanations" for our involvement in Afghanistan were true (rather than that GW was a nutcase and Obama a coward), we'd have as much justification for dropping a missile on this judge as we do on the Taliban.